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Disaster Recovery as a Service

Key Considerations for IBM Disaster Recovery Planning

Disasters, both natural and artificial, can significantly impact IT infrastructure. They can cause extensive damage, leading to data loss, downtime, and even long-term impacts such as losing competitive advantage. A recent survey by Cutover found that 75% of enterprises have experienced some degree of IT-related business disruption in the last 12 months. These disruptions underscore the importance of robust disaster recovery planning.

Why Businesses Should Consider IBM Disaster Recovery

IBM Disaster Recovery offers several benefits that make it a compelling choice for businesses:

  • Minimizing Downtime: One of the primary benefits of using IBM Cloud Disaster Recovery is reducing downtime. Even a minor outage can put a business at a competitive disadvantage.
  • Cost-Effective: Businesses can avoid high upfront costs associated with traditional disaster recovery solutions, such as purchasing and maintaining physical infrastructure, and only pay for the resources they use. This makes IBM Cloud Disaster Recovery solutions affordable for businesses of all sizes and helps reduce overall disaster recovery costs.
  • Flexibility and Speed: With data and applications stored in the cloud, businesses can easily replicate their systems across multiple locations, ensuring redundancy and minimizing downtime. Cloud-based disaster recovery enables enterprises to adjust their backup resources based on current needs, resulting in cost savings and optimized resource utilization.
  • Integration with Business Continuity Plan: IBM Cloud Disaster Recovery can be easily integrated into your business continuity plan, ensuring that your business remains operational despite unforeseen events.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan

A Disaster Recovery Plan outlines how an organization will respond effectively to an unplanned incident and resume business operations. This plan ensures that businesses are prepared to face many disasters, including power outages, ransomware, natural disasters, etc.

Importance of Having a Disaster Recovery Plan

Having a Disaster Recovery Plan is crucial for any business. A successful plan will help you keep employees, facilities, and equipment safe, minimize disruptions to business operations, limit data loss and exposure to private information, cap liability, preserve your organization’s reputation, reduce financial losses, and recover lost data.

Steps for IBM Disaster Recovery Plan

1. Understanding Your Environment

The first step in disaster recovery planning is understanding your IBM environment. This includes knowing the hardware, software, and data that your business relies on. Documenting all aspects of your IBM systems, including configurations, dependencies, and interconnections, is essential.

Read our blog Steps for Implementing IBM Cloud Disaster Recovery for detailed information on IBM Disaster Recovery Implementation.

2. Identifying Critical Systems

Not all systems are created equal. Some are more critical to your business operations than others. Identifying these vital systems is a crucial step in disaster recovery planning. These systems should be prioritized in your recovery plan to ensure minimal disruption to your business.

3. Establishing Recovery Objectives

Recovery objectives are a crucial part of any disaster recovery plan. These include Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RPO refers to the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. At the same time, RTO is when a business process must be restored after a disaster.

4. Implementing Redundancies

Redundancies are a vital aspect of disaster recovery. This could involve duplicating critical systems, data, and processes to ensure they can be restored quickly during a disaster. With IBM systems, this could include using technologies like IBM PowerHA for high availability and IBM FlashCopy for data replication.

5. Regular Testing and Updates

A disaster recovery plan is only as good as its latest test. Regular testing helps identify potential issues and gaps in the plan. It’s also essential to update the plan regularly to account for changes in your IBM environment and business needs.

6. Training Your Team

Your team plays a crucial role in disaster recovery. They should be trained on the disaster recovery plan and know their roles and responsibilities in the event of a disaster. This includes knowing how to restore IBM systems to their normal state.

7. Partnering with Experts

Disaster recovery planning can be complex, especially when dealing with sophisticated IBM systems. Partnering with experts specializing in IBM disaster recovery, such as Wanclouds, can help ensure your plan is robust, comprehensive, and effective.

Wanclouds offers a comprehensive Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution for IBM Cloud. Some of Wanclouds key features include:

  • Single Pane of Glass: Manage backup and restore of Virtual Servers (VSIs), IKS (IBM Kubernetes Service), ROKS (Red Hat Openshift), COS (Cloud Object Storage) buckets, and VPC configurations across regions.
  • Backup VMware VMs: Transform VMware VMs and data to IBM Cloud VPC native VMs.
  • On-Premise Backup: Backup Red Hat OpenShift clusters running on-premises or on IBM Cloud ROKS.
  • Terraform Templates: Create Terraform templates for IBM Cloud deployments.

To get started, visit our website or contact one of our representatives at [email protected]. You can also find Wanlouds in the IBM Catalog.

Conclusion

In conclusion, given the increasing risks in the IT landscape, having a robust Disaster Recovery Plan is now optional but necessary for businesses. IBM offers comprehensive Disaster Recovery Solutions that can help companies minimize the impact of disruptions, achieve faster recovery times, and resume core operations rapidly when things go awry. By following the steps outlined above, businesses can ensure they are well-prepared to face any disaster and ensure business continuity.


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